A former student of mine gave me a couple of chapel messages given by David Wells at the Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in the Fall of 2005. I’ve reduced the file size to about 10MB each for your downloading convenience.

I aim to have these messages transcribed shortly. Brethren, they are pure gold, certainly among the best messages I have read / heard on this issue. If you are new to this site, I would advise, listen to these first.

I’m told that years ago, Dave Dunbar spoke of his desire to get David Wells to come and be a professor at Biblical Seminary. As you listen to these messages, you may be filled with sadness, as I was, thinking about what might have been, if David Wells had come to Biblical, and John Franke had gone to . . . whatever place he belongs; if Dave Dunbar was educated in postmodernism by David Wells instead of John Franke. Biblical Seminary might still be a place where men were trained in the Scriptures so as to be equipped to serve the Lord anywhere in the world, in any culture of the world, and an institution that was warning that the emerging church movement is not a real reformation but a defection from the truth carried out by "the trickery of men".

Click on the links below to listen, or right click to download:

Emergent Spirituality part 1

Emergent Spirituality part 2

Update (July 20) - thanks to my daughter Laurel for typing these out. You can go to the next page for part one, then the next for part 2, or click here for a pdf file of the whole thing. Excerpts (with my comments) follow:

Part 1

I’m inclined to think the spiritual revolution which is being described actually is in continuity with the enlightenment rather than being its termination, because there are threads of continuity that go from the modern period into the postmodern, which is, spirituality is undoubtedly the voice of the postmodern; but there are threads of continuity that go between them, and one of these threads is that of the autonomous self.

Contrast this thought to the BTS position that they have made a break from enlightenment thinking which seriously mars evangelicalism.

In this contemporary search [in contrast to Pilgrim of Pilgrim’s Progress] people don’t’ know where they’re headed and they don’t know how to get there.

Dave Dunbar likewise tells us he doesn’t know where he’s going; how reassuring!

Part 2

In this part Wells makes three points about the emerging church (applicable also to BTS):

(1) The emergent church has been altogether too facile in the way that it has distinguished modern from postmodern.

(2) It is way, way too close to the postmodern sense of the loss of truth and meaning.

(3) The Emergent Church mood, along with many other things in Western Christianity, is contributing to the shaking of Christian orthodoxy, which I think is probably the best explanation for the fact that Christian faith is now fleeing the West.

Thus BTS in going after the emerging church is not pursuing a remedy for evangelicalism but making things worse.

Other excerpts:

This distinction between modern and postmodern seems to me to be little more than a license to have spirituality without too much truth.

The Emerging people it seems to me want spirituality with a diminished sense of biblical truth as normative.

The enlightenment offered to people knowledge that was ultimate of purely humanistic naturalistic bases. And so it looked upon reason as a substitute for revelation.

Consider this statement in light of the bizarre claim made by BTS today that our training in the earlier BTS was under "an enlightenment model."

As Postmodern philosopher Richard Rorty observes, somewhere, truth is simply "what my colleagues let me get away with."

Great faithfulness, and great unfaithfulness are never very far from each other.

Which, sadly, explains the brief history of Biblical Seminary.